CHAPTER TWO

It was raining then, too - the night it started. Like the opening to some gauche gothic horror story, like some great hefty sodden blanket over a land already inked out and a road slick as a fish.

About a hundred miles door to door in an old protesting banger of dubious track record with a distinctly rebellious distributor, and I had to choose a night like this. In truth, it wasn't my choice. It was the choice of Kate and of her solicitor, and it was the choice of common sense. It was Friday night, it wasn't one of my duty weekends, and it was the night I picked up Jen.

She slumped now in the back seat like a very pretty rag doll, clenched securely at the waist by the seatbelt, her cherubic face hidden by the dark and a tumble of erratic strawberry blonde hair which turned up on her peacefully heaving shoulders, and lilted with her little limbs as they swayed and swung with the stumbling heartbeat of the car.

Jen was five, an all-knowing, confident, competent little five, sweet and intelligent with enormous sparkling and soulful blue eyes: a devastating combination. I feared for any male who ever took Jen on - it would be on her own terms, there could be no real partnership.

Kate had strafed me with her eyes again when I picked Jen up, her instinctive radar looking for signs of overwork, the booze, me falling out of my tree again, or any slyness in my manner that might suggest I would do something daft, like whisk Jen off on a plane for the States.

Poor Kate wasn't quite savvy enough to realise how broke I was. My hefty cut in salary, the cost of keeping Kate and Jen in the style to which they had become accustomed: they took their toll. I couldn't even afford to whisk little Jen off to Bognor or Bournemouth. I felt pathetic. The radar had switched itself off, Kate softening a little, though her hope these days seemed to be tempered with a massive dose of suspicion, so strong I was sure she would never fully trust me again, always expect me to one day let her down. When trust goes, you don't ever fully win it back, not even if you could make Pope. Trying again was a noble sentiment, but without that total trust it couldn't work. What was the use?

Jen was dressed and ready, trussed against the raging gusts of wind and the thick black clouds which threatened to make the journey back to the cottage, across miles of downland, at best wearying and at worst a trial.

Kate tried to pump her liquid brown eyes with sympathy laced with as much love as she
thought she could spare. It wasn't what I needed just then, but I tried to return the warmth, make my contribution to the thaw.

Her face broke out in a nearly-smile, which just stopped short of being false and ghastly.

"Take good care of Daddy, now - and no staying up late." Even now she talked to Jen rather than to me. We seemed to have lost the ability to communicate directly at all, mutually struck dumb by the sick tragedy our marriage had become.

I made an effort to talk straight to Kate. Perhaps I shouldn't have. The words sounded empty and echoey and as if they'd come from someone else.

"We'd better be making tracks: that sky looks leaden. Say hello to your mum for me. Bye."

"Bye. Take it easy."

* * *

A particularly strong gust thrashed rain against the windscreen so heavily that it swamped the wipers and brought me out of my reverie for a moment, as I struggled to see the road.

The old Ford's bumps and rattles had subsided quite considerably since we came off the motorway and reduced our speed to thread our way around the small roads across the downs.

At this rate it was going to be another half-hour before I got Jen back to the cottage and the bed she needed so much. I softly cursed the work that had kept me at the office rather later than usual and left me to face this grim journey in such conditions with my weary little girl. Still, there was nothing I could do about that now, except make sure we arrived home safely.

I remember it was almost as though just thinking that made something happen.

He must have dashed out of an opening in the high hedge which lined the road and just stumbled or lumbered into the path of the old Ford without even noticing it. There was no chance to brake, as I heard and felt a muffled thud and gained a fleeting impression of a silver-clad torso, with arms and legs windmilling wildly, shoot up past the windscreen and over the car.

My reactions were immediate but completely automatic, as I tried an emergency stop, forgetting about the rain. The brakes naturally locked, the tyres aquaplaned uselessly, and the big Ford slewed across the road, thumping a rear panel heavily against one of the low banks at the roadside on which the hedges grew.

Jen woke with a start and a thin, high scream on her lips. There was a terrible panic deep in her eyes of a kind I had not seen in her before - like a young rabbit face to face with the weasel.

Her scream gradually subsided into a heartbreaking, choking sob, as I half climbed into the back seat and tried to reassure her. But she wasn't hearing me, or the rain, or the lumpy cough of the car engine or anything else. Like someone caught between a nightmare and a reality that might be just as bad, she just sobbed and sobbed wordlessly behind fixed, unseeing eyes.

I found I'd been saying something soothing.

"It's going to be all right, darling. We've had a little accident, but don't worry, it will be all right.

"Daddy has to get out for a moment to see what happened, but I'll be back in a minute. All right, love?"

The deep, heaving sobs continued to rack the little frame and I noticed she was tugging ineffectually at the lap strap around her tiny waist. Of course, it must have bitten deep into her as I panic braked, bruising her stomach or ribs. At very least, she must be pretty severely winded.

I released the belt clasp and let it fall, then scrambled back into the front seat and ripped at the door catch, stumbling out into the sheets of rain like a Mafia victim bundled into the night.

The sheer force of the rain made me grab the flapping coat around me and squint as I tried to lid my eyes against the runnels of water pouring down from my already slicked hair.

Back in the road, there was nothing.

Where I had expected to see a limp body with limbs sticking out at impossible angles and a lake of blood, there was only a road washed clean by a river of rain.

I started to walk back heavily towards the spot, conscious only of my heart thundering in my ears, the cold droplets running down my neck and, somewhere behind me, the soft sobs of a frightened little girl.

As I walked I tried to work out stopping distances in my head, taking into account the speed - it must have been about 45 mph at most - the rain, the state of my brakes and tyres, and the state of my mind at the time: the shock may have slowed my reactions.

The road was no more than 12 feet wide, hedge to hedge, with no pavement out here on the downs. Here and there it was crossed diagonally by a frantic brook of rainwater and there were occasional potholes turned into babbling pools, but nowhere was there any sign of the drama that had just happened here, much less a body.

With my heart not so loud in my ears now, but a mounting sense of something cold creeping up my spine, I searched the roadside hedges one by one, then quartered the road twice, up as far as a distant bend then back down to the car again.

Nothing.

Once I fancied I saw the tyre marks the old Ford had left, as I had fought desperately to stop the thing.

But still there was no body.

For an age, I stood listening to my own quickened heartbeat and the unrhythmic hunting of the old car's worn engine trying to find tickover, as the night trickled down my collar and slowly soaked my shoulders. Everything and nothing went around in my head, and I could feel the adrenaline shooting through my veins.

Had I fallen asleep at the wheel and dreamed it? Not a chance. I had had several bouts of falling asleep at the wheel in the past and this didn't have anything like the same feel to it: this had been real. Horribly real.

How many times had I joked about being a trained observer? But this time, there was no question. It had happened. I had hit somebody and undoubtedly killed him - struck at about 45 mph and flung over the car, he wouldn't have stood a chance. Probably dead before he hit the road.

Who was he anyway, and where had he come from, so far from anywhere out here on the downs? There were no farms near here as far as I knew - certainly, I had seen no signs for some miles on this stretch before - and no-one but a farmer would live in so desolate a place.

The nearest village must be 15 miles away, in the direction I was heading, and there wasn't so much as a petrol station between here and there.

Then it came to me through the fogs of my confusion that there had been something distinctly odd about my victim anyway - quite apart from the fact that he had disappeared off the face of the Earth.

As gently as I could so as not to disturb some deeper fear, I tried to run back the picture of the accident in my head, a trick I had nurtured daily in my work to augment fragmented shorthand and a somewhat wooly memory.

First there was the sickening thud and a brief scraping sound, as the body travelled up the nose of the car. There, again, I could almost see the arms flailing brokenly and the silver-clad torso flashing towards me at eye level.

Silver. That was it.

The victim was clad head to foot in a shimmering silvery material which could have been a one-piece or overall.

Although I couldn't see anything clearly, I could also now recall glimpsing something of the face: an oddly smooth, hairless, featureless face, like a flat latex mask with no sign of expression and an astonishingly sick pallor.

He was dead, all right.

But where was he? And what was that odd clothing he wore - what did it all mean?

Another of those irrational rationalisations flitted briefly across my mind. Perhaps he was with someone who had picked him up, seen how badly he was hurt, thrown him into the car and driven wildly for the nearest hospital?

The chill returned. There was no other car, or I'd have passed it. There wasn't even another side turning or cart track on this section of road for quite a way in either direction.

There was nothing. No houses, no people, no cars, nobody, no explanation. Just the blackness of the night hanging heavy on the head, the scourging of the harsh rain against my taut, lashed face, the smell of ozone and carbon monoxide, and the erratic clackety-clack of the car engine, still just about running but going nowhere.

How the hell was I ever going to report this to the police? Who would ever believe me? Should I call the hospitals first to see if anyone had been taken in? What the bloody hell was going on?

"I don't know, Daddy. I'm cold and wet and I want to go home - please?"

I swivelled around swiftly, suddenly cold and stunned more than I had been by the accident, or by the vanishing body, or by anything else that had happened to me before in my mis-spent, mis-used life.

Jen was standing there in the dark. I could make out her shape by the open car door in the glow of the slowly dimming courtesy lamp and some of the stray yellow light which spilled from the headlights, still on but running much lower now than they had been because the battery wasn't being sufficiently charged by the worn and slow running alternator.

I could plainly see her angelic face, tired and puzzled.

Her lips didn't move at all. She made absolutely no sound. Yett deep inside my racing brain I clearly, unmistakably heard her say:

"Daddy...?"

CHAPTER THREE

Seems so long since I opened this notebook. The cloud lifted, the sun beat the odds for a spell, and I still have a living to make. I was falling behind my work schedule and I have no delusions that I might sell one painting for enough to keep Bede and me in luxury for the rest of our lives. I'm just an adequate artist, though I hope I may say I have my occasional flirtation with genuine creativity. But in no way will I ever be great, not even a hundred years after my death, which seems to be the approved manner.

Of course, that's an excuse for not writing. My real problem is that the next bit is hard to put into words because, well, it seemed more like a mystical dream at the time: a dream that was to turn into a nightmare, but nevertheless, there was something genuinely beautiful about it at that moment.

For an all-too-brief time, it seemed that Jen and I were closer than father and daughter had ever been before, sharing a mutual understanding, a oneness that left both of us in total awe of ourselves and of the brave new universe we believed had just opened up to us, and to us only.

Jen woke early and suddenly that Saturday morning and in the other bedroom next door I shot suddenly bolt upright in my bed, feeling as though all the terrors of hell had been unleashed on me at once. I cried out as Jen cried out, then suddenly the horrors were fast receding along with the fog of deep sleep, and it was beginning to be all right again.

She had been surprised, of course, at waking in different surroundings, especially after a traumatic experience like the one last night ...

Then with a jolt, all that was gone from my mind, as I suddenly became aware of the gentle, warm pink aura of her presence, not in my room but in my head, my body, in the light knifing through the chink in the curtains, in the walls, the quilt, the floor, the bedside table - all around.

She was in the very air everywhere, yet she was also me: an unshaven bleary-eyed wreck sitting naked with the quilt around my ankles self-consciously displaying the meat of some woman's misfortune. And she was at the same time an innocent blonde haired child of five in rumpled sleep suit on her little single bed in the next room, wondering at everything with all beliefs suspended.

For a moment spun endlessly out like a piece of hot glass drawn into a tube, then a long needle, then a fine hair's thickness, we simply wondered, my daughter and I, as we clung tightly to each other in a spiritual embrace of love such as the world had never before known.

We wondered passively like new-borns at the world with which we were now at one, the fantastically complex web of life on this incredibly tiny speck of dust in an unbelievably massive cosmos.

We marvelled through the pain of things too huge for our combined minds to comprehend, at the feelings within a blade of grass, the sound of colours, the vibrations and rhythms of the amazingly complex planets' dance, the minute order of an atom, the seething throb of the billions of interacting lives spread everywhere across the face of this teeming orb we call Earth...

We WERE everywhere and everything, yet we were aware of being two special characteristic, distinctly separate bodies fused into one in an interface so intimate that we were, for that magnificent moment, totally inseparable on a wave crest of time suspended completely from the vast overflowing ocean of all lives.

The 'Jen' part of us handled it all much better than the 'me' part of us. Alone, my brain would have reached critical mass and burst as the first wave of awareness washed in. But Jen was a child, ready to believe anything was possible, able to detach herself from the impossible and simply accept anything purely because it was there; absorb it all and build out of it a fantastic new rationale untenable to anyone but a child who was still largely a blank page ready for the universe to write on.

Were we spiralling now along the outer arm of some far-off galaxy, or coasting down through the DNA double helix? Were we walking the fell bastions of hell, or kissing the centre of the sun? Were we fish or foul, fur or feather, rock or rain, love or pain?

Only the 'Jen' part of us might have known, but had deserted logic and rationality and what little experience - practical and genetic - she had so far acquired, to fly helter-skelter through the virgin cosmos now laid before us like an infinitely massive and empty chessboard.

We? I was just swept along in the wake of her rushing, ravenous persona, as it embarked pell-mell on her grail like quest to see and to know and to understand everything, and more. I was an empty paper cup in a fast tidal current, a feather in the whirlwind of her incredible curiosity. But somehow I was still an essential, if largely redundant, part of her, like vestigial wings, or the third eye. I was along for the ride only, and I knew it.

But we experienced as one, still, all the breathtaking magic of every last insight: the power, the suffering, the majesty and the humbleness of a universe too intricate and finely orchestrated for the pathetically limited mind of the mere mortal to even begin to conceive.

And when that splinter of suspended time finally exploded and crashed like priceless crystal to the floor, we clung still together with a massive sense of tragic loss neither of us knew how to cope with, now father and daughter again back in the real world of a humble downland cottage yet still somehow standing outside it, empathic aliens in what we had thought was our own universe.

Back within our limited frames of reference, we felt cruelly cheated of an inheritance so fantastically rich yet so fleeting that all that remained was a massive emotional void traversed only by a thin but unbreakable strand of love.

For another age we clung spiritually together trying to drown out the emptiness with what would now forever bond us, and though neither individually nor together as one could we ever after clearly remember any of the detail of our fantastic voyage through the cosmos, we could at least indulge in the luxury of a long, soundless mourning for what had been ours, just for an instant.

Then the door creaked gently open and Jen's tiny frame stood expressionlessly on the threshold for a moment before she ran to the bed and leaped into my outstretched arms, to lie sobbing gently in a warm, untidy heap against my naked chest.

The open interface of our minds was still there, and I found I could soothe her troubles softly and silently with nothing more than a warm, pink thought.

It was only then that it really struck me - and the feeling rippled gently through Jen, too, even as I thought it - that somehow, we really had become empathic.

Until the thought registered itself on my conscious level, I'm sure Jen had not realised there was anything unusual in our contact: her child's open mind had probably casually classified it as just another of the things to be accepted as part of growing up.

The thought that we were different from the rest of humanity suddenly disturbed her, and I had to suffuse it swiftly in a massive extra dose of cosy loving feeling, scarcely recognising that I had just taken my first teetering step along the road to learning to control whatever this new ability was.

And what was it? Gods, there's the multi-million dollar question. Certainly, it was as far from the popular media conception of telepathy as I think I could have imagined.

Trying to rationalise the totally irrational, I told myself it was broadly a cognisance at an emotional level, rather than a specific act of communication like, say, a telephone call or a TV picture, although I later found that when it was needed my mind would produce a hazy vision - the way it is when you've, been staring at a fixed spot for a long time and everything becomes blurred and clouded.

Rarely, for me at any rate, was anything ever clear, except that intuitive feeling of rightness over what I was perceiving.

It almost made me laugh aloud to think about the simple telepathy experiments I had seen being performed by an old college friend who had graduated into psychology, which were supposed to prove that this kind of contact existed.

I remember I had been pretty impressed by them at the time and even wrote a piece for the paper about them.

But now they seemed like Schroter making maps of Mercury through a hopelessly inadequate telescope - they were an attempt to test by science something we did not have the science to understand. This was something which needed a radically new science unfettered by classical chains of thought.

Was there anyone else out there like Jen and me? The idea was something of a jolt to my conscious. I didn't really have an inkling of how to begin looking - or even if I should.

Come to think of it, I had only just started to understand how it was we now were.

Surely if there were others, we'd have heard through the media? I knew how resourceful they - we - were at digging out the curious and the oddball. And yet...

There was something tugging at my mind: the edge of a thought, like a fish nosing at the tail of the bait. It was unpleasant - an uneasy feeling that I knew would soon surface, but equally knew would be particularly nasty when it did.

But another thought from the practical side of the brain was beginning to creep through. We had an accident last night. Disappearing body or no, it was still an accident and still reportable.

Distanced from the horror and unreality of the event by a night's sleep in a warm bed and by promising daylight, I could almost believe that it was simply that my state of shock hadn't allowed me to find the body.

Someone was dead out there, somewhere on a lonely road.

I gently lowered the now sleeping Jen into the cosy bed and she stirred only slightly as I slid out, pulled on jeans and a sweat shirt and reached for the telephone.

"Desk sergeant, please," I heard myself saying.

"Desk sergeant? I want to report an accident."

The number of times I'd talked to the police in the past, squeezing, wringing and cajoling out of them the often heart-rending stories of other people's accidents - but somehow when it came to my own, the details tumbled out foolishly and self-consciously in a ragged heap.

As it went on it got worse, my usual self-confidence gradually crumpling at the edges as I began to realise I hadn't thought this through for a moment.

Even as I babbled out some of the finer points for the second time, I realised with an awful certainty that he wasn't going to believe me.

The catch in his voice brought confirmation.

"No body you say, sir..."

That pause hurt.

"And dressed all in what, sir? Tinfoil, did you say ... wearing a rubber mask, was it?"

The sergeant was going to have a hoot telling the rest of the boys at the station about this one - it should at least be good for a pint or two.

And when two world-weary coppers went out to check the accident scene and found precisely nothing except my incompetent skid marks, perhaps even the sergeant himself would come around to give me the standard lecture about wasting police time.

If my mind hadn't been so full of that most incredible of mornings, I would have seen this coming - I would certainly not have made that telephone call, at very least until I'd checked around again for myself.

Taken aback by how ludicrous my story sounded when filtered through a hardened police sergeant's particular brand of laconic cynicism, I choked up with embarrassment and hurriedly wrapped up the conversation, drowning a sudden urge to become abusively indignant with the realisation that in his position I would have felt exactly the same.

The whole situation began to seem even more appalling as I realised with an astonished horror that at nine on the dot on Monday morning, I was due to be at that same police station for my routine police calls.

But it was as the phone clicked palely back into its cradle that I began to become fully aware of what had been nibbling away at my mind before that excruciating conversation had even started.

That's when the nightmare chose to begin.

CHAPTER FOUR

In that morning a darkness suddenly fell, black as midnight, and a quiet thunder started in the depths of the earth with a thin vibration, almost below the level of audibility to the human ear. Steadily the trembling grew to a palsy, then thickened as the floors and walls of my stone-built cottage began to shake like quivering foam rubber.

I leaped across the room to where Jen was, hoping to grab her and bolt, but missed the bed, lost my footing in the darkness and crashed to the floor, hitting my temple a nasty crack on a wooden chair by the bed. Stunned for a moment, I gagged hopelessly on the floor like a stranded fish, struggling to clear my head as Jen's stark terror washed over me and the house crashed and rattled like a runaway railway wagon all around us. I could hear crockery splintering on the stone floor in the kitchen, and the creaking and cracking of beams and floorboards.

With a massive lurch, an outside wall caved in and sent stone, plaster and bits of tile and timber cascading into the room like a deadly waterfall, shooting up a cloud of dust so thick that for a moment it was impossible to breathe.

Although I was struck several times by chunks of debris opening up flesh wounds I could feel were bleeding, the main mass of the rubble luckily fell towards the outer side of the room, plunging through the floor into the living room below.

I dragged myself from beneath a large lump of rough-edged plaster and screamed:
"Jen !"

Immediately, I could feel her presence again and knew that she was still on the bed, which was largely untouched. But there was a massive change in her. Although I could see nothing through the blackness and the dust, I could feel her mind reaching out warmly to reassure me, as my own thrashed around in pure horror. Somehow she had shaken off sleep now and her fear had given way to an awe-inspiring calm.

"Don't believe it," Jen seemed to be saying. "If you don't believe it, it can't happen. They're putting it in your mind to destroy you. It isn't really true as long as you don't believe it."

I hesitated for a long, nasty moment. There was no denying the heavy darkness, the missing wall, the rubble all around, the dust in the air or the vibration now growing strong again.

And yet Jen's air of conviction, understanding and authority was overpowering. She knew she was right.

I could feel that throbbing vibration welling up through the ground again, though more slowly than before. It still seemed so real - how could I deny it?

Then I saw the creature, still at least 500 yards away, but glowing with a ghastly green phosphorescence through that thick darkness: a massive lizard-like monster the size of a large dinosaur with thousands of glistening sword-like teeth set in row upon row in cruel, dripping jaws, its unblinking popping yellow eyes staring straight at me and its huge scaly body lurching closer with each new rise in pitch of that awful vibration.

"Don't believe it! It isn't true. It doesn't exist. It isn't really there.

"lt can hurt you only if you believe it. You can't be hurt by something that isn't there.

"lt's Them - They are making it with Their minds, but They need you to believe it for it to be real. Don't believe it, Daddy!"

The monster faltered as Jen took over in my mind, gently soothing my fears until I felt steadily farther and farther away as if she, and no longer I, was my personality and I had packed up and temporarily left home.

I watched the scene in a detached and horrifically fascinated way, as the monster drew to a halt and began to look panicked.

It slowly turned and I could see massive muscles twist and the green scales apparently melting off it as the creature tried desperately to lumber away, a strangely thin, pathetic scream of terror echoing up from deep within that huge and powerful frame.

Then, with a rushing like a mighty wind and a final shrill cry of bitter anguish, the beast was gone. And I passed out uselessly into the rubble.

* * *

I came to, still naked and utterly confused, downstairs amid the ruins of the house. It was daylight again, just the way it had been before ... before what? I struggled to remember as I gazed around open-mouthed at the devastation. Although most of the cottage was still standing, it was as though the entire front had been pushed in by some giant paw - then I remembered the nightmare vision, and Jen.

She sat nearby on a chunk of wall rubbing her eyes with tiredness, her beautiful blonde hair full of plaster and dust, her face and arms scratched and bruised.

I scraped myself to my feet and checked that she was all right, then turned to look at the wreckage again. A feeling of despair swept over me before my presence of mind could take over again: what now?

All at once becoming self-conscious about my nakedness, exposed as we now were to the outside world, I scrambled about in the ruins of my home searching out clothes for the two of us, then hastily dressed myself in jeans, boots and a thick shirt and turned next to Jen with a pair of dungarees in my hand.

She was fast asleep on a fallen chunk of wall which had dumped itself incongruously in the middle of the Iiving room. She looked much older than her five short years, somehow, her face lined and ashen yet peaceful for now in sleep.

I scooped her up with no fear of waking her, dressed her gently then thrust her into the back of the car parked outside, which had miraculously escaped all but one chunk of falling cottage - and that had merely added one more rather large dent in the bonnet.

All I could think of was getting as far away from here as possible, just in case that Thing should return.

I leaped into the driver's seat and fumbled for the ignition key in the steering lock - not there!

Everybody else in this part of the country left their keys in the ignition, but an ex-townie like me would never dream of being so careless. No, I always expect to have my car stolen, as a result of having to be security minded for so many years in the certain knowledge that if I weren't I would lose my wheels in the big city. The best I could manage by way af bravado was to leave the doors unlocked.

Muttered curses poured from my lips, as I dived out of the car again and back to the oddly unfamiliar mess that the cottage had become. There had been a nail just behind the front door where I hung all the keys. Finding it was the problem.

After shifting several huge stones and some fair size heaps of plaster and splintered timber, I found the front door which I levered up, complete with frame, with a fallen roof beam.

The nail was there, bent and twisted, but the keys weren't. I spotted them in the dust below and delicately balanced the door with the beam, then snatched them up and ran back towards the car. The sound of the front door crashing back into the rubble made me jump nervously as I fumbled the car door open and poured myself in behind the wheel.

I looked back at Jen as I bundled the key into the ignition and prayed for the old Ford to start. Jen was tranquil, though her eyes twitched slightly beneath the heavily-lashed lid as she slept.

Unusually, the old Ford's ropey engine spat and awoke, roaring as I hit the throttle and crashed into first gear almost simultaneously. Jen barely stirred.

We wheelspun away down the short track from the cottage to the downland road and I glanced in the rearview mirror at the remains of the cottage and shuddered.

At the end of the lane I turned on to the B-road towards Stoning and the main road to the motorway, without knowing why. Perhaps my only thought was to get as far away as possible in the shortest time possible. Perhaps I just wasn't thinking at all.

Who were They? What did They want with us?

Jen had seemed to feel that a group was involved in whatever the hell just happened to us. Yet what HAD just happened to us? A nightmare?

That kind of thing just didn't happen. Houses - especially cottages which had stood since the Gods knew when - didn't just fall down suddenly. Dinosaurs had stopped wandering these downlands millions of years ago.

What the hell was going on?

My mind thrashed wildly around trying to find a rational angle on what had happened, without any success. A freak earthquake I could just about buy if I suspended my normal journalistic cynicism completely for a while, but there wasn't a PR company in the world that could make me go for a dinosaur roaming downland, at any price. It could only be some quite incredible trick of the mind.

My thoughts inevitably leaped back to Jen and the weird change that had come over her since the accident.

Just a couple of days ago nobody could have convinced me - even with a graphic demonstration - that telepathy or empathy, or whatever it was, even existed, let alone on the scale I had witnessed it in Jen. I couldn't believe that one so young and innocent could handle something so enormously frightening as we had just experienced - whatever it really was - in so cool and effective a manner. She seemed to instinctively know what was going on and how to deal with it.

And yet I had caught something there in her mind, as she calmly fought off that beast, that told me she didn't really know what it was she was up against: she was just so powerful at what she did that They couldn't break her defences -not yet, anyway.

I also seemed to remember some trace of an idea, emanating originally from Jen of course, that what we had just experienced was merely an opening gambit, to test our defences.

They would be back.

The hamlet of Stoning, the kind of village journalists always describe as sleepy, was bustling as much as it ever did as we drove through - but that wasn't much. We passed a handful of oncoming cars and vans, a similar number of people, and had a close encounter with a farmer's filthy old Mercedes as we overtook a tractor leaving the village on our way to the main road. Somehow the sight of what passed for civilisation around there started to bring me back down to earth a bit more and turned my mind to mundane practical matters.

Perhaps I should turn around and drive into town and go to the police? The memory of the sergeant's tone on the telephone earlier convinced me that wasn't such a good idea.

Should I call up my editor and try to enlist his help? He certainly had the contacts around here. But Anders was also too close to retirement to want to think about anything newer or more complicated than what was coming up in his garden this year. A good journalist in his time, he had put himself out to grass a few years ago now - luckily for him, he too had realised when the bottle was beginning to get to him - and was no longer interested in being anything other than a hick-town hack.

Anders would never lay himself on the line for me, especially with the kind of story I'd be asking him to accept.

Out on the A-road now, I put my right foot down a bit more in anticipation of the dual carriageway I knew was ahead, and the Ford spurted forward with the kind of enthusiasm I had thought had long ago deserted the old rust bucket. I was mildly surprised, but pleasantly so for once today.

Once more I settled down to think, driving on auto pilot.

OK, so strike out the police, strike out old Anders. Who was left?

Kate? No way. She'd have me in the crazy house - for my own sake, of course - quicker than I could blink.

My folks? They'd always help me, but they lived up the other end of the country, an impractical six-hour journey away in this old heap of mine.

What I needed was a bolt hole, not too far away but in a place with plenty of people. If someone was after us, I couldn't help thinking, there might be greater safety in numbers: you can get lost in a crowd.

It all came down to Jen. I had to protect her as best I could, at all costs. I felt more of a father than I had ever done before - a father with a very vulnerable little daughter I felt frighteningly impotent to protect.

We needed sanctuary desperately. Then we needed to find out what it was that had happened to my baby girl.

Somehow the perfect each-way solution just slotted into place out of the chaos in my head: Dennis Smith, my old partner in crime from university. We wrote only once or twice a year, but we did still at least maintain contact. Dennis, now Dr Smith, had a big bachelor flat overlooking one of the London parks and just as importantly, he was a researcher in behavioural psychology with many contacts in the very field we needed - the paranormal.

I slid the Ford off the dual carriageway on to the motorway slip road and another piece of this bright new plan just clicked too beautifully into place, as I realised we were already driving towards London.

CHAPTER FIVE

It's amazing how many things remind me of Jen - things you'd never expect. This morning I was tugging myself up the steep track beside Twll Du, the Devil's Kitchen, on my way to another painting session on Glyder Fawr. There's a place where you round a sharp outcrop of rock in the lee of a sheer face and suddenly look up to a vista of sky.

There, sticking out of the perpendicular granite wall in an impossible position, was a spindly rowan crone-cranked against the cobalt morning and looking for all the world like an old picture book witch cursed to guard the flanks of the Glyders and Y Garn for eternity from prying mortals like me.

Will Jen look like that, so old and wizened, next time I see her - if I ever see her again? That was my absurd and irrational first thought.

It was utter nonsense, of course, because where Jen has gone she will age hardly at all compared to her poor lonely dad, who will seem to her to have grown old at a ridiculously rapid rate when she returns - assuming she manages to do so while I am still alive.

But I'm getting ahead in the story again and there's no time for that. I must stick to the facts in their proper order if I'm to have any hope of finishing the task I have set myself.

This morning did, however, bring back to me the memory of how Jen was sleeping as we pulled into the Heston service station on the M4 that morning. She looked remarkably care-worn for a child of five, as though old age had leaped on her in the past hour or so and turned her beyond 70 within the frame of a baby.

It occurred to me in a sudden bolt of surprise that I'd never before known her to sleep like this. Jen had always been the one in the family who could do without sleep: staying up until around 10.3O every night and up in the morning all chirping and fresh at about 5, while Kate and I - even after an early night - would attempt to lie in as long as possible, each often trying to pretend to the other that we were still asleep, figthing off the necessities of the new day. And Jen had never napped in the day like other young children. It was as though something was now constantly draining her energy.

I stopped the car engine and Jen's eyes flickered, though they barely opened. Her face retained the expressionlessness of deep sleep.

"It's all right, darling," I found myself saying, though I knew I didn't really need to explain. She would already know, but it made me feel better to say something soothing.

"I'm just going to phone Dennis to tell him we're coming."

Her cloudy blue eyes opened again and the little old lady peeped faintly out of the doll's face, saying everything with a glance, before the blonde lashes sealed them again: she understood everything perfectly and gave her approval.

Then as I walked towards the glass doors forming the entrance to Heston I realised she had understood my subliminal fears, too, as I heard the locks on all the car doors snap shut at once - on a Ford too old ad too basic to have a luxury like centralised locking.

The extraordinary change in Jen was just beginning to make me a little uneasy.

Dennis was out. I left a detailed message on his answering machine, outlining my problem with Jen as best I could in such a brief space of time, and walked back to the car hoping that he hadn't gone away on holiday or some long-term academic mission. We would need his help to find accommodation, if he couldn't put us up himself.

More importantly, perhaps, we needed Dennis's expertise and contacts to find out exactly what had happened to my little girl.

What HAD happened to Jen?

Had the shock of the accident somehow triggered something in her vulnerable young mind that had brought about this bizarre change? I somehow couldn't relate to the idea - surely there must be more to it than that or there would have been many, many similar cases in the past. The condition would be relatively commonplace. And yet I had never before heard of anything half so powerful.

Would the change be permanent and, if so, what were the consequences for Jen in the life that was all ahead of her?

Nearing the car now, I looked up - and saw Jen sitting bolt upright in the back seat, her blue eyes the size of Wedgwood dinner plates. She was staring across the car park to where a man of about 50 was getting into a bright red 3-Series BMW. She looked as though she had seen a ghost.

Unlocking the front passenger side door. I jumped into the Ford and gently put a hand on Jen's arm.

"What is it, love?"

Her feelings momentarily flooded me and swamped my emotions with a ghastly black sadness so strong it made me sway giddily sideways before I could regain any sort of composure.

He was going to die. And soon.

The relaxed, carefree man climbing in behind the wheel of the pretty red BMW had an appointment with death on the Chiswick flyover in what could only be a matter of minutes. And there was nothing Jen or I could do about it.

For Jen it wasn't just a hunch or flash of intuition - she knew. And because she knew, I knew, too.

With staggering clarity. I could sense the blowout on the front nearside tyre in the fast lane and feel that sparkling BMW slew around into the path of the articulated lorry it was in the process of overtaking. Then there was a terrible rending, tearing and splitting of metal.

And nothing but blackness.

I swiftly threw off the vision and pushed Jen back into her seat, buckling her seatbelt with fumbling, panic-stricken fingers. Then I leaped into the driver's seat, hitting my thigh on the gear lever as I went, and started the engine, fastening my own seatbelt as I drove off as fast as the old Ford would allow.

This was futile, but I had to try.

The BMW had a good start. It was also much newer and much better cared for than my old heap. And it was more powerful than the Ford, with the added advantage of fuel injection.

Still we chased it hopelessly along that great racetrack of motorway, cutting in and out of traffic with tyres screaming and the worn shock absorbers contributing to an unbearable noise that drilled through my beating brain like a jack-hammer.

As the traffic neared the Chiswick flyover, we saw brake lights going on ahead - mere unnecessary confirmation of what we already knew - we had lost. Jen had seen it so vividly when she first noticed the man in the red BMW, walking happily in the sunshine then, but already as good as dead.

It was half an hour before the traffic got going again, after wailing sirens galore and in a sort of daylight twilight of blue flashing lights.

Jen and I didn't speak. There was nothing to say. She fell into a sickened sleep and I stared at nothing, mind numb, until the cars in front began to move again.

As we finally passed the accident scene, I turned away. I'd already seen it all. I didn't use my rearview mirror again until we entered the City.

* * *

There's something about London that has always appalled me, yet at the same time filled me with a raging fascination. It has always struck me as a wonderful city to visit, but a ghastly place to live.

Generally when I've been among those teeming crowds for a few hours, I can't wait to get out. That's why I didn't enjoy working there very much, I suppose, and my obligatory spell of "tricks" on the big national newspapers didn't last very long.

As we hit Piccadilly Circus the traffic was much as I remembered it - like an out-of-control carousel with all the painted ponies trying to carve each other up as they jockeyed for position at astonishing velocities. You had to have your wits about you and you had to know exactly where you were going. I didn't, on either count.

I half remembered Den's address and roughly the direction to take. But it looks so different on the ground when you're hemmed in by walls of snarling traffic.

As my bovine confidence began to decay into panic, I felt Jen's presence again. I momentarily flipped the dipping rearview mirror and saw her eyes were still closed, but she was definitely there in my mind, bathing it in the warm aura that told me she was in control again.

In front of me a pathway seemed to just open up in the traffic, like the parting of the Red Sea, and I found myself pointing the Ford down that empty lane.

It was as though by doing so I totally relinquished control and the car was driving itself on auto pilot. And all the other traffic was moving out of the way, as if the road was being cleared by some unseen giant snowplough.

The scene was utterly surreal.

Gradually picking up speed, we flashed past a row of bustling grille-fronted shops and on to a wide roundabout. I didn't have a chance to look for traffic, though it seemed peculiarly irrelevant now with my very special little back seat driver in command.

The car plunged straight on, then I spotted an off-licence that triggered some sort of hazy - probably drunken - memory.

Taking me so much by surprise that the wheel spun out of my hands, the old Ford screeched suddenly around a left-hand corner into a quiet, leafy street bordered on our right by a park - and I knew Jen had found the place.

Whether she had plundered my memory from the distant past or whether she had reached out and found Dennis's own mind map of his home territory, I just couldn't guess. But I was quite confident as the car slid up to the kerb and pulled up, that in a moment I would be able to walk up to his front door without looking at the scrap of paper in my pocket bearing the hastily-scribbled address, obtained at Heston from the phone's directory inquiries service.

Dr Dennis Smith greeted us hugely, as if we were long-lost relatives flown in specially from the ends of the Earth. But then, everything about him always seemed to be on a scale much larger than the terribly average world around him.

Six foot five inches tall, heavily built and stooping as most people of his height do - particularly, for some reason, academics - he had a lazy amble that helped to give the impression of a somnambulant bear.

Going thin on top now and showing signs of the mileage of a man on the down slope to 40, he still maintained a semblance of youth with his remaining hair worn long over his collar. A tight but grizzly full beard added to the impression of The Jungle Book's Baloo the bear on a rough day.

Dennis ushered us into a massive Victorian/Edwardian living room that looked like a jumble sale just before the crowds are let in - everything in heaps, but all the piles perfectly orderly.

He blustered around grinning and making more welcoming noises for a minute or two, then ambled off to the kitchen to make some tea - the English all-heal - and a light lunch.

I flopped on a comfortable sofa and relaxed for a moment, realising that the morning's excitement was already catching up with me.

Jen wandered idly around the room, looking at the pictures and books and examining her surroundings like a little dog sniffing out a trail through the woods.

She still hadn't spoken a word today, so I tried to prompt her.

"Would you like a wash, love, to freshen up?"

"No, thank you, Daddy. Not yet."

The answer was in my head, rather than verbal, and she carried on wandering around without even looking at me.

But she obviously felt my concern at her lack of audible speech. Again, she was calming me as, in my head though not through my ears, I heard her say: "Don't worry, Daddy. I'll talk when I have to."

I wanted her to speak to Dennis, to avoid the possibility of making him feel too shocked or uncomfortable - which is the least I'd feel if some strange child's thoughts suddenly popped into my head. She seemed to agree.

And I realised Jen liked him, although there was an inkling of something about him that she didn't want me to know just yet - something she wouldn't allow to cross our ethereal link.

Earlier that day I had felt a little unreasonably frightened of Jen, or at least uneasy of her, despite the unconditional child's love I knew she felt for me.

Now I was feeling like a protector whose role is being usurped by the innocent he is supposed to be keeping from harm.

Oddly, somehow, I felt threatened.

CHAPTER SIX

My thoughts were cut short by the phone ringing.

"Get that for me, would you?" Dennis yelled from the kitchen.

I was already on my way across the room in the general direction of the ringing, which seemed to be coming from a chair piled high with clothes. Shifting a heap of shirts and jumpers on to the floor, I finally found the phone and picked up the receiver.

"Hello. Dennis?"

The voice was a woman's, brisk and businesslike but with a slight trace of an Irish accent that gave it a musical quality.

"Sorry, he's on kitchen fatigues at the moment. Will I do, or shall I go and relieve him?"

"Oh hi!" she didn't seem particularly thrown off balance, as I might have expected of a girlfriend, so I guessed she was a colleague.

"You must be the one with the talented little girl," she said, coolly getting straight into business. "Dennis told me about you.

"I'm Maddy Rourke, parapsychology, and I'm eager for you to bring her in for some tests. What do you say?"

Right on cue, Dennis bellowed from the kitchen: "Is that Maddy? Tell her I love her and I want her body – now!"

"Smith says he want you, " I told the phone simply.

"Tell him I'm still saving myself for someone who can cook and keep house, and doesn't believe parapsychology is the thinking woman's WI."

She at least half meant it and there was an edge to her voice that told me she was terribly serious about her work and wouldn't ever let a mere male distract her.

Dennis cut in from the kitchen again, in a voice loud enough for Maddy to hear at the other end of the phone line: "And watch out – she bites!"

She laughed a little, for the first time betraying a tiny measure of well-hidden warmth.

"I heard that – and you'd better believe it!" The mood turned brisker again. "Anyway, shall we say two o'clock at my lab?"

"I'll look forward to it," I said, not really quite sure I was ready to cope today with a woman as formidable as Maddy sounded.

"Me, too," she said, quite genuinely. Then a bit more efficiently again: "Now may I talk to Jennifer for a moment, please?"

The request threw me completely off balance for a moment, just enough so that I found myself meekly complying: "Of course. See you later."

I held the phone out for Jen and somewhat to my surprise, she strode over and took it, as though she had been waiting for the call.

She said absolutely nothing. But I was sharply aware of her communicating with Maddy. I wondered what Maddy's reaction was on the other end of the line, but couldn't avoid the feeling that Maddy had had a strong idea of what she was letting herself in for despite the fact that Dennis knew nothing at all.

Instantly, I felt jealous. It was the first time Jen had had such intimate contact with someone else and it felt like an act of violation against my young daughter.

The span of seconds whipped up in me a sense of unthinking outrage against Maddy and a massive disappointment in Jen, all completely unbidden and unnecessary. It msut have been something like finding your early-teenage daughter in bed with the local yob, I thought – a desolating experience, all the more annoying because Jen had deliberately excluded me from this conversation completely, for the first time.

After a couple of moments, she put the phone gently back into its cradle, then turned to me and smiled one of her sweetest smiles. I found it a little aggravating and slightly unnerving, too, undeer the circumstances.

"It's all right, Daddy," she said out loud.

"I like her. She's special, too."

Then Dennis came in with a tray groaning with food and I was left wondering – because Jen, almost as if to teach me a lesson, had finally used the very narrow medium of communication of speech, as I had asked her to only a couple of minutes earlier – whether Jen’s words simply meant Maddy was a special person or if she, too, had my daughter's strange and powerful talents.

Plonking the tray down on a debris-strewn coffee table, Dennis signed to us with a wave of a mighty paw to help ourselves, but was clearly burning with curiosity.

"Come, on then. What's all this about?"

Gradually, as I delivered between mouthfuls of sandwich the detailed resumé of how we came to be here, Dennis grew less interested in his own lunch and his jawline visibly slackened. Occasionally he would interrupt my bite-punctuated monologue to clarify some minor detail. He wanted everything.

Jen, meanwhile, took no interest in the proceedings and little more in her lunch, pecking in dispassionate fashion at the filling of a sandwich then leaving the remains of the carcass on her plate as she tried another with similar result.

My occasional sidelong glances warned me she looked tired again, a waning beauty with red beginning to rim those gorgeous blue eyes.

Was she up to our two o'clock appointment? Should I cancel?

An intuitive feeling of urgency told me I didn't dare.

My tale was winding down now, like Dylan Thomas's God-speeded summer's end. I could tell because Den's questions, at first rapid-fire, had subsided to sporadic. And I was beginning to repeat the good bits, which my acute sense of the sparing use of words told me was when it was time to shut up.

Finally, I shut up.

Dennis sat for a long time in absolute silence, a tiny pat of half-chewed bread lilting gently on his lip. I could sense that his brain's after-burners had cut in, but he still wasn't having much joy with this subject.

Yet somehow, it never seemd to occur to him for a second to disbelieve anything I said. He swallowed the whole thng without the slightest sign of difficulty and it came to me suddenly that if he'd told me any of this, let alone all of it, I would probably have sneered him into a babbling heap in the corner, or at very least politely suggested he had fallen out of his tree.

Jen. It had to be Jen. She had got to him.

Dr Dennis Smith was a thoroughly good, objective scientist of the old school. I had seen him test, test and test again, then spend weeks analysing an unexpected result before finally accepting it then laboriously working out the framework within which it could possibly exist. Even then, he would have to talk the whole thing out with as many experts as he could reach before believing the evidence of his own eyes.

Quod erat demonstrandum. That was Dennis to the death.

Or was I just being paranoid now?

This once-closest of friends knew my pitiful honesty of old. He could tell if I was lying.

At length, he jumped up abruptly.

“Let's go!”

Dennis was suddenly back in action mode. He had obviously decided the answer wasn't this time to be found by thinking, but by doing: by going to see Maddy at the lab.

Thankfully, he insisted on driving. I didn't know if I could handle another of Jen's parting-of-the-Red-Sea tricks today.

Despite Dennis's bizarre interpretation of the police driving system and his horrendously ill-maintained Citröen 2CV, I found the ride across town almost relaxing compared to the horrors of trying to drive a car which is totally in the control of a five-year-old.

Once again Jen slept, awaking only as we screeched up to the lab and Dennis leapt out, leaving the battered 2CV rocking like a rowing boat in a force nine gale.

"We're here, sweetheart."

My Gods! Now I was doing it. Now I was chosing to think things rather than speak them. I was still reeling from my own involuntary use of non-verbal communication as my feet hit the car park tarmac and I saw the lab.

My first impressions were of a large slabs of grey, a testament to concrete arrogance thrown down among the typical gothic eloquence of a Victorian/Edwardian street scene.

Where were the planners when this great city was being raped?

The lab looked like a bunker with few windows breaking its po-faced exterior, or perhaps a dead whale left to rot then bleach white on some forgotten beach.

Dr Maddy Rourke met us at the entrance. My story must have taken longer to tell than I had tought, because we were late.

She was the kind of woman it was impossible to miss in the largest crowd: tall, long-limbed and slender-hipped with olive skin and long, dark hair that bounced down her square-set shoulders and shone when she moved. He crisp white lab coat was nudged asisde by a strong breast-line that, with the shoulders and the distinctive bone structure of her face, gave her an Amazonian look.

As we got nearer, I noticed her intense dark brown eyes dancing with a deep warmth and intelligence.

Maddy had it all and I now realised Dennis amost certainly hadn't been joking about wanting her. She could turn any man's head.

Meeting Maddy shook me. I had been expecting someone fatter, frumpier and much older – Maddy looked about 30. I was shocked into a sort of bubbling paralysis by her imtimidating beauty.

My immediate reaction was distrust, legacy of several relationships which which had gone painfully wrong, including my marriage to Kate. But I had the trace of a feeling that Maddy was different somehow, perhaps too wrapped up in her work to even consider men and the niceties of human relationships.

That strange phone silence between Maddy and Jen also helped to fuel my feeling of unease – call it jealousy or whatever – and I found myself watching constantly for some further communciation, although there was nothing at all I could detect.

All the same, I was going to be on my guard around Dr Maddy Rourke.

As we said our hellos Maddy seemed to naturally assume command, pinning plastic security tags to each of us in turn then marching us efficiently off down endless corridors to a door which bore the simple message "G4".

As she opened the door, a man's voice hailed Maddy from behind us. We all stopped and turned to look.

"Maddy, forgive me for interrupting. Our four o'clock conference. You won't forget?"

He was tall, grey, somewhere in his fifties, but still obviously fairly athletic with a cultured Oxbridge accent. Something about him instantly told me Administrator or Polictician, rather than Scientist.

Maddy turned her charm loose on him just a touch too much. I could sense some antipathy, even though Maddy was clearly subordinate.

"Andrew, I'd never miss a budget meeting. You never know when there might be a chance to get hold of some more equipment.

"Incidentally, allow me to introduce you..."

I wasn't really listening from that point, although I did gather that this was Andrew Southworth, project director, and I did manage a hello and a faint smile, perhaps even a handshake.

Just then I was far more interested in what Jen was telling me.

There was a picture in my head of a dark, dangerous man; icy, totally calculating and without a fibre of compassion, the kind of man who would have no compunction about using any means he thought might achieve his own ends, even murder.

He was the kind of man who would sell his soul, or preferably his grandmother’s, without a second thought.

And as the picture cleared and became lighter, I saw thin lips drawn back in a sneer, pale eyes blazing with a wicked intensity and the lines of the face tensed into a frightening mask of evil.

I glanced at Maddy to see if she, too, was receiving this. Either she wasn't or she was doing a fantastically casual job of covering it up.

Then I realised the dark man in my head was Andrew Southworth.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The office reflected the woman: clean, tidy, no-nonsense with an air of class achieved despite regulation furniture and fittings, by the tasteful, simple way it was decorated and the healthy, glossy green plants all around. I found myself wondering what her home would be like – and suffering cruel butterflies in the stomach that came straight from the libido with the realisation that I also wanted to take her to bed, whether I trusted her or not.

I fought the feeling, with doubtful results. It upset me to be reminded that, in the end, I was just another ordinary male, thinking with my dick just like all the others.

We chatted for a while of things of absolutely no consequence and mostly no relevance. But I felt slightly better to see Dennis perched on the edge of his seat, almost salivating at every word Dr Rourke uttered in her gentle, lilting Irish brogue.

She seemed to be deliberately ignoring the subject of Jen's special talents and it appeared she didn't want to talk about anything that had happened to Jen and me, as if she already knew it all. Recalling again the strange telephone incident with Jen, I decided that she almost certainly did.

It soon became apparent that with Jen, she was going to skip all the usual basic preliminary tests – the cards, the coloured lights and so on – and move straight to the serious stuff.

"We're going to try a Ganzfeld experiement with me as the transmitter," Maddy said, to Dennis as much ass to Jen and I. She had lost me already, anyway. Luckily, she glanced at me in time to catch the mist of non-comprehension flitting involuntarily across my face.

She explained with a touch of irritation catching at the edge of her voice, apparently mildly annoyed at having to talk "basics".

"What that means is that we try to eliminate all possibility of outside stimulii getting through to the subject – radio static, visual images, smell, taste, anything – while we carry out a controlled experiment or series of experiments to ascertain the psi level of the subject."

Maddy paused for a moment to see how we were taking it so far.

"Hence the Quiet Room," she said simply, motioning to a door to her right and rising from her seat to indicate it was time to leave. We all got up to accompany her.

"Basically," said Maddy, opening the door and waving us down another clinical corridor, "it's a sort of fallout shelter designed to keep out anything and everything, from stray radio and TV signals to microwaves and even cosmic static.

"It's surrounded by six feet of lead and 12 feet of concrete, and there's a huge coil of cable running all the way around it that goes to earth to damp down any conventional radio waves before they even reach the cladding.

"Just to make sure nothing is getting through, we have two monitoring stations operating 24 hours a day, just outside the installation. One checks atmospheric conditions on the outside and the other – on the opposite side of the installation to avoid any co-interference – is fed by sensors on the inside. They have a computer link which can tell us instantly if there is a 'leak' or if unusual conditions occur inside or out."

We had sotpped at a lift.

"Naturally," said Maddy, "there is only one place to build such an installation."

She pressed a lift button, and something clicked in my head.

"Underground!" I blurted out, thinking aloud.

Maddy looked at me as if I had just said something embarrassingly obvious and I experienced a flushing glow of the cheeks such as I hadn't felt since I was a schoolboy.

She waved an open palm in the direction of the waiting lift. Inside she carried on talking, after pressing another button.

"One of the many unkowns in this field is the mechanism by which the psi factor works – and I know it works, incidentally, because I have seen ample proof over a number of years.

"There is a strong suggestion that this is a latent facility dormant in every member of the human race, and if we could somehow discover what makes it work we would be well on the way to unlocking the capability for everyone on this planet."

Maddy's face was beginning to glow, her eyes glittering and dancing with the conviction of someone on a hobby horse. Fanatical women make me uneasy and Maddy was beginning to sound that way, just a little.

"Just think how that would enrich even the humblest life – adding a whole new and fantastic sense to the human repertoire. It would be like bringing sight to the kingdom of the blind.

"It could, quite simply, be the greatest discovery since fire or the wheel – possibly greater than both put together. At a stroke it could change the world completely, not to mention our entire perception of absolutely everything around us."

Maddy had begun to get worked up and I could now clearly see the vital spark of a crusading ambition crackling deep within her, before the rising tide of self-consciousness began to wash in, exposing her achilles heel, I thought. She was saved by the lift bell.

"Here we are," aidd Maddy softly, almost reverently. "Welcome to the Quiet Room."

We stepped out of the lift into a corridor that ran off into the distance left and right, but directly ahead was a huge vault door. Just to its left was a computer work station. Maddy stepped up to it and fed a long sequence into the keyboard then waited, still bent over the console but looking now at the giant door.

From the way the lab coat fell on her shapely frame, I could easily discern the slender hips and smoothly-rouded buttocks above the long, slim legs.

Whether I liked her as a person or not, I couldn't avoid a sudden disquieting surge of blood to the loins.

The shock of the strength of my feelings distracted me to the point that I was the last to notice the massive door to the Quiet Room sliding silently open on a great hall that was almost as bare as it was featureless.

Jan was first to walk down the short corridor to the inside, her sudden move out ahead sharply reminding me that she was there – and that she was certainly aware of my feelings about Maddy. Now I felt guilty of being profoundly insensitive. But the momentary awkardness was swiftly replaced by the realisation that this five-year-old now probably understood my emotions a thousand times better than I ever could. And she was obviously simply accepting them.

Humbled again, I meekly followed her inside, with Dennis and Maddy close behind me.

The Quiet Room was big, almost hangar-like and softly lit, with the same dull shade of grey serving for walls, ceiling and floor covering. There was very little inside in the way of equipment, although there was one bank of electronic gadgetry over by the wall to our right, where a row of a dozen mats had been laid down.

Jen walked towards it without hesitation while I trailed behind open-mouthed, staring around and trying to take in the size of the place. Why did it need to be so damn big?

"There's a reason for all the space."

Maddy's comment close to my ear made me jump, though I tried not to show it. Had she been inside my head, or had she just noticed my look of amazement and used her intuition to work out what I’d been thinking?

"I was wondering," I said rather lamely.

"We sometimes run mass sessions here," said Maddy coolly. "Once we've assessed the individual psi factor, we can then put people into a group for a controlled study of how they perform.

"The idea here was to build something big enough to take a sizeable crowd. It's designed to accept a mezzanine floor, and we could probably eventually sub-divide again to achieve three floors. That's an awful lot of people, if we can ever find enough with the right talents. We're convinced many are too embarrassed or too frightened of being the odd one out to come forward.

"Once we start getting a few answers we hope to overcome that problem by training people to use the latent abilities, but that still seems some way off yet.

"Just recently, we've started developing the group activity as best we can at the moment. What we do is to try to get a number of people to perform a psi task as a single unit.

"There haven't been any spectacular results in this direction as yet, but it is extending our knowledge of what this facility ISN'T and so ultimately, we hope, it will help tell us precisely what it IS."

"How long have you been working on this?" I interposed as we arrived at the mats.

"Five years since my PhD," Maddy replied, "And we''ve covered a lot of ground in that time, though you shouldn't expect any eurekas in this field.

"It's an area which, by its very nature, cannot be explored except in a very limited way by conventional scientific testing, because it challenges much of the traditional science of the classroom. Catch 22!

"You can't see psi or touch it or smell it. You can't put it under a microscope or in a test tube.

"And it's difficult to measure in any meaningful way. When you do try, Chaos Theory takes over. It's like something that changes its form when you look at it. You have to do what you can with a sideways glance, knowing you may never be able to study it directly.

"One of the really difficult problems with psi measurement is that the effect – at the moment, anyway – diminishes the more you try to test it. When someone stares at a computer screen all day, their perrformance decreases in speed and skill in direct relation to how long they’ve been sitting there. It's like that with psi, except the fall-off is very rapid and acute.

"You have to devise ever more complex tests and change them more and more frequently to stop the subjects getting subconsciously bored. They need a constant challenge."

"And what about Jen?" I asked quickly, gently turning the subject back to the matter in hand.

Maddy's face took on an even more intensely serious look, although with an excitement bordering on fear deep in her dark eyes.

"I'm convinced there is something incredibly strong in her, even before testing. You must already realise that I have some limited use of psi faculties myself?

"There is a potency in Jen that I have never before experienced. This little girl of yours could turn out to be the Philosopher's Stone of parasychology.

"I'm already sure none of our standard tests is any good for a subject as gifted as her, but at the moment I've got to start with some of them because they're all I've got."

Maddy turned to Jen, who had already settled down on one of the mats as if she knew exactly what to do. She was lying down, relaxed, with her arms at her sides in a position that looked supremely comfortable.

She smiled up at me sweetly and I jsut couldn't worry about her. She had all the appearance of having everything well under control.

Dennis and Maddy set to attaching the little EEG pads to Jen's scalp, then Maddy produced a set of headphones and a couple of blank eyepieces.

"We play random white noise through the cans," Maddy explained, "and cover the eyes with ping-pong balls cut in half, to minimise the risk of sensory impulses getting through in the conventional way."

Dennis was alraedy working at the electronic gadgetry when Maddy finished with Jen and joined him. The lights went right down.

As I started to walk towards them, still looking at my little girl all wired up but remarkably tranquil, a shriek of excitement from Maddy made me leap almost out of my skin.

"That's incredible!"

TO BE CONTINUED ...